The diesel emissions cheating scandal will cost
Volkswagen an extra $3bn (€2.5bn), because engines are proving "far
more technically complex and time consuming" to adapt the
company said.

The additional cost, for fixing engines in the
United States, takes the total bill to $30bn.

… Shares in the German carmaker initially fell
sharply on Friday although they later recovered most of the lost
ground.

"This is yet another unexpected and unwelcome
announcement from VW, not only from an earnings and cash flow
perspective but also with respect to the credibility of management,"
said Arndt Ellinghorst, analyst at Evercore ISI.

VW first admitted in September 2015 that it had
used illegal software to cheat US emissions tests.

Is Russia saying the US is already doing this?
Are they worried that we might? Perhaps it isn’t fake news after
all?

Russia is warning the U.S. not to take action
against its government-backed media outlets, such as RT and Sputnik,
threatening retaliation, CNN
reports.

"When it comes down to a fight with no rules,
when the law is twisted and turned into an instrument for the
destruction of a TV company, every step against a Russian media
outlet will be met with a corresponding response," said Russian
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Thursday.

"And whom this response will be aimed at,
that is what Washington needs to figure out as well," she added.
"The clock is ticking."

Gone are the days of taking documents to the
library to scan or spending a bunch of money on a scanner for your
home. You can find many applications
for Android, iOS, and Windows that put scanning at your
fingertips no matter where you go.

These seven awesome apps provide more than just
scanning. They are smart enough to adjust and correct items for you,
let you save them where you need to, and are perfect for both
business and personal use.

Friday, September 29, 2017

The grocery chain, which Amazon
acquired for $13.7
billion in late August, announced Thursday it "recently
received information regarding unauthorized access of payment card
information."

People who only shopped for groceries at Whole
Foods should not be affected, according to the company, which said
only venues such as taprooms and table-service restaurants located
within stores — which use a different point-of-sales system —
were affected.

The article ominously warns, that smart
billboards can guess a motorist’s home
address, age, race and income level based on the vehicle they are
driving. And also claims, advertisers will be able to send messages
to a person’s smartphone as they pass by a smart billboard.

We
don’t have enough yet to form a clear picture of the users of
Facebook or Twitter (and what else?) Perhaps it will take a serious
academic study, because the intelligence services aren’t going to
publish their tricks. What? You thought the US was above such
tampering? Silly you!

Following Facebook’s own disclosure, Twitter
says that it has identified more than 200 accounts on its service
that are linked to Russia. Using the approximately 450 accounts that
Facebook shared as part of its own review, Twitter says it found 201
corresponding accounts on its own service. It has also been
transparent about advertisements purchased by the Russian publication
Russia Today (RT).

… In addition, Twitter says that post-Soviet
states and Russia have long been responsible for the majority of
spammy and automated content on its platform. The company has
automated systems in place to try to catch this kind of content, and
it takes down in excess of 3.2 million of these accounts across the
world every week. However, Twitter says that it is planning to roll
out several changes to the ways it detects suspicious and otherwise
spam-ish activity on the service.

(Related). Are all of these Twitter users
Russians or merely Russian dupes?

During the height of the 2016 campaign, Twitter
users shared more “misinformation, polarizing and conspiratorial
content,” than actual news stories, an Oxford University study
released Thursday says.

Researchers
found that voters on Twitter shared large amounts of content
linked to Russia, Wikileaks and other “junk news sources,” with
the help of bots — automated Twitter accounts, programmed to simple
tasks like spread news.

The study also found that levels of misinformation
on Twitter were higher on average in swing states than in than in
uncontested states. Researchers culled the information from
22,117,221 tweets collected between Nov. 1 and Nov. 11.

… The Senate
Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark
Warner (Va.) ripped
Twitterafter the
company shared its analysis with the committee.

“Their
response was frankly inadequate on almost every level,” he said
after the briefings.

… FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is asking Apple to
activate these FM chips already in iPhones. "Apple is the one
major phone manufacturer that has resisted (activating the chips),"
said Pai in a statement.
"But I hope the company will reconsider its position, given the
devastation wrought by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria."

… Update: Apple has responded
to Pai's request with the statement below, claiming that its most
recent models don't actually have FM capability which exec Phil
Schiller also noted in a tweet.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

The Ponemon
study (PDF),
commissioned by risk and compliance firm Opus, questioned 625
individuals familiar with their organizations' third-party risk
management posture. The BitSight study (PDF)
took a different approach and examined the visible security posture
of more than 5,200 legal, technology, and business services companies
known to be third-parties to finance organizations. Both surveys
show a significant gap in the security posture of primary
organizations and their third-party suppliers.

For many large
organizations, this gap is increasingly exploited by malicious actors
as the soft underbelly route into the company. The Ponemon study
shows that this situation is, if anything, worsening; while the
BitSight study highlights some of the security weaknesses commonly
found in third-party vendors.

Ponemon found
that 56% of respondents had suffered a third-party data breach in the
last year -- an increase of 7% over the previous year.

… Part
of the problem is that organizations have little visibility of, or
into, their supply
chain. Fifty-seven percent of Ponemon's respondents don't have
an inventory of the third-parties with which they share sensitive
data, and the same number don't know if their suppliers' policies
would prevent a data breach.

You might not think of an IEEE Summit as the most
likely place to hear an intense talk about the lack of security at
America's gas pumps, but that's exactly what happened last week at
the The
38th IEEE Sarnoff Symposium in Newark, N.J.

Scott Schober, president and CEO of Berkeley
Varitronics Systems (BVS) , used his 20 minutes on the podium to
talk about how unsuspecting customers are putting themselves at risk
using a debit or credit card at a gas pump in the US.

"Security
and convenience don't go in hand-in-hand," he chided
the crowd.

… A couple of people in the crowd asked about
chip and PIN systems -- where you insert the card and it reads the
chip rather than a magnetic strip -- and while Schober allowed that
these were moderately more secure, he reminded people: "There's
no chip and pin in any gas stations in the US," and there is
unlikely to be until 2020.

While
critical infrastructure has been targeted by sophisticated threat
actors, attacks that rely on commonly available and easy-to-use tools
are more likely to occur, said Europol in its 2017 Internet Organised
Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA).

The report covers a wide range of topics,
including cyber-dependent crime, online child exploitation, payment
fraud, criminal markets, the convergence of cyber and terrorism,
cross-cutting crime factors, and the geographical distribution of
cybercrime. According to the police agency, we’re seeing a “global
epidemic” in ransomware attacks.

When it comes to critical
infrastructure attacks, Europol pointed out that the focus is
often on the worst case scenario – sophisticated state-sponsored
actors targeting supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and
other industrial control systems (ICS) in power plants and heavy
industry organizations.

Facebook may have
dropped the ball with the U.S. presidential election, but it was much
better prepared for last weekend’s federal election in Germany.
Today, Facebook
outlined all its efforts to prevent malicious actors from
meddling in the election.

“These actions did not eliminate misinformation
entirely in this election – but they did make it harder to spread,
and less likely to appear in people’s News Feeds,” wrote Richard
Allan, Facebook’s VP of Public Policy for EMEA.

That includes:

Deleting tens of
thousands of suspicious accounts

Fighting fake
news in video and text clickbait

Showing
alternative perspectives on news stories via Related Articles

Offering space
where political parties could describe stances on core issues

Providing a
comparison tool for the political parties

Launching an
Election Hub to see which candidates were on the ballot

Sending in-app
notifications for people to learn about and follow their newly
elected leaders

Working with the
German Federal Office for Information Security

Training
political candidates about online security issues

Establishing a
dedicated support channel for reports of election security and
integrity issues

Giving news outlets access to its Berlin
studio for distributing Facebook Live reports on election results

In the digital age, it’s hard to know which data
about ourselves is really ours. Who is allowed to have data on your
internet use? Your shopping habits? What about data on your body,
your voting record or how furniture is laid out in your home?

It may surprise you that various companies and
government agencies around the U.S. may already have that data, even
if you never consented to give it to them.

For Alex Alben, this is a huge problem. Alben is a
privacy advocate and he’s Washington
state’s first-ever chief privacy officer. It’s his job to
try and protect the personal data and the privacy of citizens in
Washington, and by extension, around the country.

We speak with Alben on this episode of the
GeekWire Podcast to learn about how our personal data ends up in the
hands of unfamiliar people, as well as what citizens and
organizations can do to help protect privacy.

Equifax
Inc. will debut a new service that will permanently give
consumers the ability to lock and unlock their credit for free.

The service will be introduced by Jan. 31, Chief
Executive Officer Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. wrote in a Wall Street
Journal op-ed Wednesday, a day after taking the helm. The company
will also extend the sign-up period for TrustedID Premier, the free
credit-monitoring service it’s offering all U.S. consumers, he
said.

… Most significantly, the service will be
offered free, for life.”

… TransUnion, a rival credit-reporting
company, also offers a free credit lock called TrueIdentity “and we
have for some time,” company spokesman David M. Blumberg said in an
emailed statement.

… Smith, who announced his retirement Tuesday,
will collect about $72 million this year and $17.9 million in coming
years, according to Fortune.
This reportedly adds up to about 63 cents for each customer who was
potentially exposed in the company’s data breach.

Mark Zuckerberg
defended Facebook on Wednesday after President Trump accused the
company of being “anti-Trump.”

“Every day I
work to bring people together and build a community for everyone,”
Zuckerberg wrote
on the site. “We hope to give all people a voice and create a
platform for all ideas.”

“Trump says
Facebook is against him,” he continued. “Liberals say we helped
Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like.
That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”

One of the reasons that I continue to encourage
teachers to blog with students is that it helps to create a record of
what your students have observed, learned, created, and shared
throughout the school year. At the end of the year, you may want to
take that blog and turn it into a physical item that your students
can share with their parents. BlogBooker
is a tool that can help you do that.

BlogBooker
is a service that allows you to turn your the contents of your
Blogger or WordPress blog into a PDF. Using BlogBooker
is a fairly straight-forward process. BlogBooker
walks you through each step of the process including the first step
which is exporting the contents of your blog as an XML file. The
second step is entering the URL for your blog. After completing
those two steps just sit back and wait as BlogBooker creates a PDF or
Word file based on the text and images in your blog posts.

The free version of BlogBooker limits you to three
books and one year's worth of blog posts. There are upgrades
available that will allow you to include more blog posts and will
include higher resolution images.

… Previously
criminals used physical 'skimming' devices or USB sticks or CDs to
install malware
within ATMs but since 2015 "a new and unnerving trend... has
been picking up speed," Europol said in a 40-page report
on the latest ATM crime trends.

"The criminals have realised that not only
can ATMs be physically attacked, but it is also very possible for
these machines to be accessed through the (bank's) network," the
report said, which was published in conjunction with the Trend Micro
security software company.

One of the tricks used by hackers is to send a
so-called phishing email to bank employees which once opened,
contains software to penetrate the bank's internal computer network.

Once the ATM has been targeted and told to
dispense the money "standby money
'mules' will pick up the cash and go."

Top stock-trading mobile apps have security
problems that are easy to uncover and exploit, to the point that they
could be used to hijack accounts or profile victims for other types
of crime, according to new research.

Twelve of the 21 apps did not validate the
security certificate for, making it possible for an attacker to
eavesdrop or even alter logins or transactions.

Two did not use encryption at all.

All but one of the apps would operate on a phone
that had been “rooted,” meaning that core permissions for who
could have full access to the phone. Banking apps commonly will not
operate on rooted phones.

Many apps saved passwords and account data in
unencrypted text on the phone, placed data that should be kept secret
into the source code in ways attackers could find it or contained
other security flaws.

The
keyboard is developed by Chinese firm GOMO, which has numerous
applications in the mobile app store, under two developer accounts,
namely GOMO
Dev Team and GOMO
Apps.

According
to Adguard security researchers, the applications were designed to
siphon a large amount of user data, including Google account
emails, device language, IMSI, location, network type, screen size,
Android version and build, and device model.

The
data is gathered and sent to a remote server without explicit user
consent, the researchers reveal. Furthermore, the practice also
contradicts the application’s privacy policy, which claims that the
software will never collect user personal information.

I suppose this will help them find terrorists who
talk a lot about being a terrorist, but what about those who don’t?

… Twitter said
today that it has started testing 280-character tweets, doubling
the previous character limit, in an effort to help users be more
expressive. “Our research shows us that the character limit is a
major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English,” the
company said in a blog post. “When people don’t have to cram
their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare,
we see more people Tweeting — which is awesome!”

A small group of programmers
wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10,
2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911
service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle
woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to
break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room
through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever
reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood,
Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the
server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911
dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a
threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in
the millions.

Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter
exceeded that number, resulting in chaos. Because the counter was
used to generating a unique identifier for each call, new calls were
rejected. And because the programmers hadn’t anticipated the
problem, they hadn’t created alarms to call attention to it.

… software becomes unruly because the media
for describing what software should do—conversations,
prose descriptions, drawings on a sheet of paper—are too different
from the media describing what software does do, namely,
code itself. Too much is lost going from one to the other.

Do you need to digitize any printed text so you
can maintain a soft copy of it? After all, there are a lot of
advantages
to going paperless. If so, all you need is an optical character
recognition (OCR) tool.

We’ve covered several online
OCR tools in the past, but nothing really beats the convenience
of being able to digitize documents right from your Android phone.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

One of the world’s “big four”
accountancy firms has been targeted by a sophisticated hack that
compromised the confidential emails and plans of some of its
blue-chip clients, the Guardian can reveal.

Deloitte,
which is registered in London and has its global headquarters in New
York, was the victim of a cybersecurity attack that went
unnoticed for months.

One of the largest private firms in the
US, which reported a record $37bn (£27.3bn) revenue last year,
Deloitte provides auditing, tax consultancy and high-end
cybersecurity advice to some of the world’s biggest banks,
multinational companies, media enterprises, pharmaceutical firms and
government agencies.

During the past year, there has been a
surge in data breach reporting regarding Amazon S3 servers left
accessible online, and which were exposing private information from
all sorts of companies and their customers.

In almost all cases, the reason was that
companies, through their staff, left
Amazon S3 “buckets” configured to allow “public” access.
This means that anyone with a link to the S3 server could access,
view, or download its content.

The SEC is
hiring more cybersecurity help after breach that may have allowed
hackers to profit from stock trades

… In the wake of the breach, the SEC is
immediately hiring additional personnel to aid in its cybersecurity
efforts, Clayton plans to tell the committee. “I also directed the
staff to enhance our escalation protocols for cybersecurity incidents
in order to enable greater agencywide visibility and understanding of
potential cyber vulnerabilities and attacks,” he plans to testify.

… In mid-July, Chinese
censors began blocking video chats and the sending of photographs
and other files using WhatsApp, and they stopped many voice chats, as
well. But most text messages on the app continued to go through
normally. The restrictions on video, audio chats and file sharing
were at least temporarily lifted after a few weeks.

WhatsApp now appears to have been broadly
disrupted in China, even for text messages, Nadim Kobeissi, an
applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research
start-up, said on Monday. The blocking of WhatsApp text messages
suggests that China’s censors may have developed specialized
software to interfere with such messages, which rely on an encryption
technology that is used by few services other than WhatsApp, he said.

“This is not the
typical technical method in which the Chinese government censors
something,” Mr. Kobeissi said. He added that his company’s
automated monitors had begun detecting disruptions of WhatsApp in
China on Wednesday, and that by Monday the blocking efforts were
comprehensive.

… The censorship has prompted many in China to
switch to communications methods that function smoothly and quickly
but that are easily monitored by the Chinese authorities, like the
WeChat app of the Chinese internet company Tencent, which is based in
Shenzhen.

Is anything that a President of the United States
says NOT newsworthy? The least they could do is point to the
news President Trump is attempting to distract us from (and
succeeding all too often).

Twitter
pledges to update public policies after Trump threatens North Korea

Twitter didn’t act to
remove President Donald Trump’s tweet threatening North Korea in
part because it is newsworthy, the
company said today. Twitter says it will update its public
guidance on what factors may lead to a tweet being pulled from the
platform — or allowed to stay on it — to include a consideration
of newsworthiness, as part of an effort to make the rules clearer to
users.

“The Article is a thorough analysis of how
the current scheme for regulating lawyers has failed to
adapt to technology and why that failure is disastrous. It discusses
(1) why technology, electronic communications, and social media
require specialized attention in lawyer regulation, (2) what
mechanisms can be harnessed to meet this need, and (3)
the (sometimes entertaining) ways in which lawyers’ use of emails,
tweets, texts, social media, data storage, computerized research, and
so forth cross the lines of ethical and professional values.
The ABA recently amended the Model Rules to add the following
language to the Comment of Rule 1.1: “[A] lawyer should keep
abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the
benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” A few
lawyers are still behind in embracing the many technological tools
available to assist in their practice. Others are taking full
advantage of the benefits of technology – while turning a blind eye
to the significant ethical and professionalism risks. In an area
where the mistakes are easy to make and the resultant harms can be
extensive and severe, lawyers need to be warned and trained;
expectations need to be standardized, and those standards enforced.
The need for formal guidance on the lines between appropriate and
inappropriate electronic behavior is much more acute than the need
for training with respect to long recognized practice hazards. As
the recent ABA 20/20 Commission’s failures amply illustrate, the
ABA cannot be expected to address the risks of technology within any
reasonable time. While increasing pressure on the ABA to shore up
the Model Rules, bar associations must take action now. One option
is formal ethics opinions that a lawyers can research by
jurisdiction, if the lawyer is alert enough to ask questions. A
better option is a statement of best practices standards adopted by
state, local, and practice group bar associations. Some
jurisdictions already have professionalism and civility creeds, but
almost all of these are devoid of guidance on technology use, as well
as fraught with drafting and definitional problems. Standards need
to be rewritten to clarify the nuances of technology use and ethics.
This Article offers specific language to serve this purpose.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation today
released the 2016
edition of its Crime in the United States (CIUS) report, a part
of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The report, which covers
January-December 2016, reaffirms that the worrying violent crime
increase that began in 2015 after many years of decline was not an
isolated incident. The violent crime rate increased by 3.4 percent
nationwide in 2016, the largest single-year increase in 25 years.
The nationwide homicide rate increased by 7.9 percent, for a total
increase of more than 20 percent in the nationwide homicide rate
since 2014…

“While the Agency deserves credit for compiling
a basic guide to searching their FOIA reading room, it still omits
information or leaves it spread out across the Agency’s
website. In one egregious example, the CIA
guide to searching the records lists only three content types
that users can search for, a review
of the metadata compiled by Data.World
reveals an addition ninety content types. This guide will tell you
everything you need to know to dive into CREST and start searching
like a pro.”

It's not a trial! Students and teachers are
eligible for Office 365 for Education, which includes Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, OneNote, and now Microsoft Teams, plus additional
classroom tools. All you need to get started is a valid school email
address. Get started.

Today and tomorrow, we are offering open access to
all of the articles, reports, videos, blogs, and essays we have
published on our site. We do this as a show of appreciation for our
readers, both old and new, without whom MIT SMR would
not exist. There’s over 30 years’ worth of material on the site,
so I encourage you to explore!

Monday, September 25, 2017

It was not
the first time Muhammad Rabbani had problems when returning to the
United Kingdom from travels overseas. But on this occasion something
was different — he was arrested, handcuffed, and hauled through
London’s largest airport, then put into the back of a waiting
police van.

… Particularly unusual about Rabbani’s case
is that he had been stopped on many prior occasions — dating back
to 2008 — and never before did police arrest him when he declined
to turn over his phone or laptop passwords. He is already well known
to the authorities due to his employment with Cage, and he has never
been accused of involvement in any sort of terrorism plot.

… While the existence of Schedule 7 is widely
known in the U.K., the government has kept secret some significant
details about its function.

Those who are examined under the law will usually
be searched and questioned by officers. Like Rabbani, they may also
have cellphones or laptops they are carrying inspected or
confiscated.

Unknown to people who have gone through this
process, however, is that police may also have covertly downloaded
the contents of their phone and sent copies to the British
eavesdropping agency Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

Every month the agency was receiving a copy of
phone data that had been “downloaded from people stopped at U.K.
ports (i.e. sea, air and rail),” according to a classified GCHQ
document
obtained by The Intercept from Edward Snowden.

Distrustful
U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight

An international group of cryptography experts has
forced the U.S. National Security Agency to back down over two data
encryption techniques it wanted set as global industry standards,
reflecting deep mistrust among close U.S. allies.

In interviews and emails seen by Reuters, academic
and industry experts from countries including Germany, Japan and
Israel worried that the U.S. electronic spy agency was pushing the
new techniques not because they were good encryption tools, but
because it knew how to break them.

Acting Chairwoman Ohlhausen noted that the FTC
initiates many of its cases under the agency’s deception authority,
stating that “from an
injury standpoint, a company’s false promise to provide certain
privacy or data security protections harms consumers like any false
material promise about a product.” The Acting
Chairwoman further highlighted that the most commonly alleged
injuries in the FTC’s body of privacy and data security case law
are financial injury and health and safety injury. She also
emphasized that the type of injury is not dispositive in the FTC’s
decision of whether to bring a privacy or data security case. The
FTC also evaluates the strength of the evidence linked to the
consumer injury, the magnitude of the injury (both to individuals and
groups of consumers), and the likelihood of future consumer injury.
In closing her speech, Acting Chairwoman Ohlhausen rhetorically
raised three questions: (1) whether the list of consumer
informational injuries is representative, (2) whether these or other
informational injuries require government intervention, and (3) how
the list maps to the FTC’s statutory deception and unfairness
standards. Acting Chairwoman Ohlhausen plans to address these issues
in depth at the December 12 workshop.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

WeChat has confirmed what has been
rumoured all along i.e. it gives all user information to the Chinese
government. The popular app in a privacy statement is now informing
the users that virtually all the private user information will be
disclosed to the authorities.

WeChat, owned by the Chinese firm
Tencent, is a messaging app similar to the WhatsApp. With over 662
million users, the app, besides being the dominant messaging app in
China, it is one of the largest in the world.

The Department of Homeland Security was short on
details when it said
Friday that it had notified 21 states of Russian efforts to hack
their election systems in 2016. For one thing, the department didn't
publicly identify the states. For another, it didn't say how many of
the hacking attempts were successful — or to what degree.

Based on reporting by The Washington Post,
Associated Press and other news outlets — plus statements issued by
some state officials — we now have a complete list of the affected
states. The Fix has mapped and categorized them, according to what
we know about the success or failure of the cyberattacks.

… Colorado

Secretary of State Wayne W. Williams downplayed
the hacking threat. “This was a scan, and many computer systems
are regularly scanned,” he said in a statement. “It happens
hundreds, if not thousands, of times per day. That's why we continue
to be vigilant and monitor our systems around the clock.”

Perspective. An effective way to counter “fake
news” on either side of the political spectrum? Is this really all
it takes?

The
mysterious group that’s picking Breitbart apart, one tweet at a
time

Hardly anyone paid attention last November when a
strangely named Twitter account, Sleeping
Giants, sent its first tweet into the digisphere. “Are you
aware that you’re advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right’s
biggest champion, today?” read
the tweet, aimed at a consumer lending outfit called Social
Finance. “Are you supporting them publicly?”

Within 30 minutes, Social Finance replied,
tweeting that it would stop running ads on Breitbart.

It was, it turns out, the start of an odd, and
oddly effective, social media campaign against Breitbart,
the influential conservative news site headed by Stephen K. Bannon,
President Trump’s former campaign chairman and ex-chief White House
strategist.

Sleeping Giants is a mysterious group that has no
address, no organizational structure and no officers. At least none
that are publicly known. All of its leaders are anonymous, and much
of what it claims is difficult to independently verify. A spokesman
for the group wouldn’t identify himself in interviews for this
article.

But the group does have a singular purpose,
pursued as relentlessly as Ahab chasing a whale: It aims to drive
advertisers away from Breitbart. “We’re trying to defund
bigotry,” the spokesman says.

Sleeping Giants’ basic approach is to make
Breitbart’s advertisers aware that they are, in fact, Breitbart
advertisers. Many apparently don’t know this, given that Web ads
are often bought through third-party brokers, such as Google and
Facebook. The brokers then distribute them to a network of websites
according to algorithms that seek a specific target audience (say,
young men) or a set number of impressions.

As a result of such “programmatic”
buying, advertisers often are in the dark about where their ads end
up. Advertisers can opt out of certain sites, of course, but only if
they affirmatively place them on a blacklist of sites.

The music
business is growing again — really growing — and it’s because
of streaming

Familiar song, new tempo:
Music streaming is big, and getting bigger fast. Digital downloads
are falling off a cliff.

Oh, and one more familiar
refrain: The music industry loves the money it’s getting from
subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music, but it wants
YouTube to pay them much more.

… More than 30 million people are now paying
for a subscription streaming service in the U.S., which pushed
streaming revenue up 48 percent, to $2.5 billion, in the first half
of the year. Streaming now accounts for 62 percent of the U.S. music
business.

… Retail sales were up 17
percent, to $4 billion, and wholesale shipments were up 14.6 percent,
to $2.7 billion.

Meanwhile, iTunes-style
digital download sales continue to fall. They’re down 24 percent.
Because why buy songs for a
dollar when you can legally stream (almost) anything you want for a
price that ranges between zero and $10 a month?

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About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.